Rotary wing aircrafts are favored over fixed wing aircraft as a potential solution for many flight applications, for example, the oil and gas industry wherein workers are transported for long distances in very difficult weather conditions. As additional applications in a complicated operating environment are discovered, ensuring safe operations and reliable completion of the mission becomes more difficult. Traditional maintenance methodologies do not address the need of conducting highly reliable missions, since in many cases, the helicopters are away from their home airfield, and the maintenance provided there, for a longer duration. In other application scenarios, for example, emergency medical service where it is highly important to know the location of the helicopters so that required preparation can be made at the locations in terms of arranging the medical equipment facilities and similar other needs on a timely manner. It is required to have continued situational awareness and communication with the crew, it is also significantly important for the flight dispatchers to know and be continuously aware of their fleet locations to plan for any change in mission profile, including rerouting of flight paths and alternate landings, with the complete understanding of flight position and tracking.
Known solutions provide usage of minimum onboard health oriented data collection and monitoring where most of the analysis has to be done on the ground subsequent to the helicopters arriving back at their home base. These systems pose significant constraints to the maintenance personnel as they have to plan for alternative fleet arrangement.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a single system for monitoring health usage and flight tracking, and transmit critical health related information to an operations or maintenance center so adequate preparations can be made for the incoming flight, and planning can be made for effective use of the fleet of helicopters. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the exemplary embodiments will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.